Impacts of the influx of e-waste into Hong Kong after China has tightened up entry regulations

Abstract

China was the world’s largest importer of e-waste in the 2000s, with e-waste entering the country via different pathways. It was treated informally by using primitive techniques. Since the 2010s, the quantities of illegal importation have been gradually decreasing as China started to amend and enforce the importation ban policy. The amount of imported e-waste is predicted to disappear in the coming decades if China keeps to her stringent enforcements. Being a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, Hong Kong (HK) pursues an independent judiciary, rule of law and retains a free trading policy. As such, a substantial amount of e-waste has entered HK, and is stored in the northern part of the New Territories (NT). Some of the e-waste has been dismantled and recycled, jeopardizing the local environmental and the human health of this increasingly affluent city. This article reviews the effects of the new movement of global e-waste, to find out whether the same mistakes made in China are being repeated in HK, in particular, the environmental and health impacts of recycling e-waste. In addition, the management strategies to deal with the problems in this densely populated city are also summarized.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Environmental and health impacts
• global movement
• Hong Kong soils
• soil remediation

Acknowledgments

This work was sponsored by Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Soil and Groundwater Pollution Control (No. 2017B030301012), and State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Integrated Surface Water-Groundwater Pollution Control. Additional support was provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41890852). The authors would like to thank Ms. Ursula Absalom, MA, for improving the text.